Plus One (38 page)

W
hen he got home from school, Alex plopped the kids in front of the TV and ducked into the yard with an iPod, a bottle of Sancerre, and a bag of tortilla chips. He felt winded and lightheaded, a faint hum ringing in his ears. He sat on a bench on the far side of the lawn, shoveling back chips between slugs of wine. The Circle Jerks blasted in his earbuds as he picked through the wreckage of the day. The meltdown at school, the scene with Miranda, Clive's money grab—everything was collapsing around him. No, everything had already collapsed. He was just finally realizing it.

The encounter with Miranda—of all the day's humiliations, that had been the worst. How he'd gone limp on her bed, laid his head in her lap, arched his hips up as she slid his pants down, then scrambled away as she matter-of-factly explained her intentions—thinking of it now, his stomach tightened into a ball. Had he really been stupid enough to mistake her Hollywood hustle
for actual attraction? Had there been anything real there at all? If she hadn't mentioned her script and the deal with Figgy, would he have gone through with it? Even though he hadn't technically consummated anything, he'd gone far enough. He'd cheated on his pregnant wife—what an asshole. Worse: what a cliché.

And for what? For the sex? It would've been nice, amazing even—Miranda was so young and smelled so good, and he might never again get a chance to press up against a woman like that, to touch and taste and plunder all that freshness. And hadn't Figgy told him (in so many words, way back when) that as long as he kept quiet, he could do what he wanted? So why hadn't he gone ahead—why had he retreated like a prude the moment she'd mentioned Figgy? Now that he played the scene back, he knew. Sex was beside the point. The pull Miranda exerted, the force that drew him to her bed that afternoon—sex was just a flavor in the air, a hint of something else. He hadn't gone to Miranda to get laid; he'd gone because he was empty, defeated, wrecked. He'd ached for the way she made him feel when they talked and ate together. He'd gone to Miranda's apartment for the same reason he'd tried writing the punk rock book. He hadn't been horny—he'd been hungry.

What if Figgy found out? She might already know—that's part of why he loved her, her knowingness. It was miraculous. The idea of life without her flooded over him in a panic. The life they'd built together—their kids, their home, the whole mess of it—he had to protect that, get it back. All his plotting and score keeping and stupidity—none of it made sense now, it was all bound up in his fear of her leaving him, eclipsing him. And when she'd gone to Baltimore, it felt like he'd been ripped in two, like he might never get her back.

Then the sun was out of the sky and he was still sitting here, the bag empty and the bottle drained beside him. He needed to go inside and check in with the kids, see about dinner, corral them
for baths, books, and bed. But he couldn't get up. Across the lawn, the dog appeared from behind an azalea bush and loped toward Alex, tongue lolling out of its mouth. He ruffled the fur around her neck and she plopped down at his feet.

Alex brushed the crumbs off his shirt and stared up at the house. A face appeared in the façade, tufty bangs of rhododendron framing two top-floor windows, the patio doors below a crooked grimace. They'd lived here almost six months, and it still didn't feel like home. Would it ever? Regarding it from a distance like this, he felt a familiar mix of awe and discomfort. He might never shake the sense that this place, this whole life, wasn't
his
—this was Figgy's prize, her dream realized, her reward for a job that only got more punishing the better she did. He could enjoy the house, luxuriate in it even, but whatever pleasure he felt would forever be fogged by guilt… over what? His dependence? Her stress? The fact that he'd given up his livelihood to enjoy the spoils of her success? The fundamental fact that he was now a man who didn't provide, married to a woman who did?

And what the hell was
that
? The guilt, the anxiety, the teeth gnashing—was all that just symptomatic of some knuckle-dragging, hunter-gatherer, prideful
manliness
lodged in a deep cavity of his soft, gushy selfhood? No, never. That wasn't him. Marrying Figgy, having Sam and Sylvie—these were the most important things he'd ever done or would do. He was a caretaker, a householder. He was a new man. Making a life for his family didn't make him a mooch. And whether or not he ever felt like he deserved this life, he was here, in it. Somehow, whether through an accumulation of decisions or the inextricable pull of fate, he'd moved into the very house he'd peered into twenty years before, imagining an ideal imaginary future. The revolution had come. He'd landed in this life. It was time to stop agonizing over it and make some actual use of it.

He looked back up at the house. The face was gone, the thin
light of evening turning the garish pink of the house dusty and mild, all the bright colors muted in shadows. If he had any chance of repairing the damage he'd done, he had to start here, with the house. And in this moment anyway, in this half-light, he imagined the house becoming theirs, stripped of its power to impose and intimidate. If he could just find a way to
disinfect
it, to dis-empower it. Then they could all just relax and fill it with their messy, rowdy, twitchy, totally unfit selves and call it home once and for all.

Alex got up and headed inside, Albert trotting along beside him. The bag of mezuzahs was right where he'd left it, on the upper shelf of a broom closet right next to the hemp fabric bag his mom had left the day she'd come to visit. He brought both bags into the kitchen and spilled the contents onto the kitchen island, picking up a booklet and flipping to a page on “declaring your spiritual intentions.” This was just the sort of language he normally dismissed as New Age twaddle. Now it was clear: The twaddlier the better.

Sam and Sylvie poked up their heads from the couch. “What's that?” Sylvie said.

“Magic stuff.”

Sam wandered over and picked up a bundle of dried sage. “Stinky,” he said, giving it a dubious whiff. “What're you supposed do with it?”

Alex flipped through the booklet. “The sage we burn. The water we drizzle. The mezuzahs go on the doorposts.”

Sylvie gave a vial of holy water a shake. “Seriously?”

“Seriously. But before we do any of that—we all go outside and pee on the wall.”

Sam and Sylvie looked at each other.

“You in?” Alex said.

“Absolutely,” said Sylvie, already halfway out the door.

• • •

Alex had a week before Figgy returned home from Baltimore, time enough to get some portion of his shit together. He gave Rosa the week off and started packing lunches, catching up on house repairs, doing drop-off and pickup, and coordinating the ridiculous array of the kids' extracurriculars (Sam: weaving, improv, potpourri; Sylvie: soccer, ballet, glassblowing). He emailed Helen Bamper and offered to help with the school fundraising gala, which this year was being staged on the New York Street set of the Warners backlot. He made it a policy to say yes to everything, the volunteering and the schlepping and all the daily business of the domestic first responder. Days were spent doing errands and chasing the kids from class to appointment, after which he'd come home and prepare elaborate meals for three—paella, cumin-rubbed yakitori, five-spice fried chicken. Keeping busy with food and the kids meant not dealing with Figgy's pregnancy or Clive's production or the humiliation with Miranda or any of the rest of it. He ignored, for instance, the delinquent-payment notice that had recently arrived from the bank about the home equity line of credit. That was immediately stuffed deep into the pile, face down to hide the red band across the letterhead.

The kids, for their part, seemed only dimly aware of Daddy's domestic reengagement; Sylvie made no mention of her special bento-box lunches and managed only a confused thanks when he presented her with a crushed-velvet skating outfit he ordered off Amazon. And Sam just seemed embarrassed when Alex picked him up early from school one day for a trip to LACMA to see the Estée Lauder exhibit.

Communications with Figgy, meanwhile, were icy—he couldn't tell during their catch-up calls how she was doing beyond feeling nauseous and overworked. Their conversations were entirely focused on the kids, Alex hearing in her tone a tacit
agreement that they should be face-to-face for the big talk. A few nights before she was set to come home, he tried to warm things up, telling her about the cleansing ritual and how they'd stunk up the house with sage smoke and how they'd made up special incantations for every room. (Alex was most proud of his blessing for the bathroom: “May this be a place of… release.”)

“What a fun dad,” she said, her voice plangent and impossibly far away. “Couldn't you have waited for me?”

Her plane was due to arrive in Burbank at noon on Saturday. The whole morning Alex was a wreck, skittering around the kitchen preparing a big shabu-shabu spread. As her arrival drew close, he grew more and more anxious, checking his phone over and over to see if her plane had landed and if she'd met the driver at baggage claim. Now that she was coming home, the avoidance, he knew, was over. The time had come to deal.

She finally came in the door just after two o'clock, keys clanging against the counter and bags thumping on the floor. She tumbled onto the couch and gathered up the kids in a big groaning hug. “Mama!” they cried, pawing and nuzzling. She looked great, her hair full and her cheeks soft and peachy.

He leaned into the squirming pile and landed a kiss on her cheek. She untangled herself from the kids, got up from the couch, and walked past Alex on her way to the fridge. Sam trailed behind her, one hand locked on the end of her shirt.

“Souvenirs?” Sam said, beaming up at her. “What'd you bring us?”

“Hold on, kiddo. We have any tea?” She smiled as the light from the inside of the fridge flooded over her face. “Oh God—all my food! My own kitchen! My own children!”

Alex got up behind her and draped an arm over her shoulder. “And your husband, too.”

She looked over and gave him the briefest of smiles. “Yes—that too.”

“So Mom Mom Mom,” Sylvie said, joining them at the fridge, the three of them clustered around her in a tight knot. “Did you? Bring souvenirs?”

“Hang on, monkey,” she said, pouring herself a glass of iced tea and lowering onto a stool at the kitchen island. “Just let me get settled. I'm all cramped from the plane. I think there's a yoga class at four—Alex, where's your phone? Mine's dead.”

Sylvie rolled her eyes and made a beeline for Figgy's backpack, ripping open the top and reaching inside. “Where?”

“It's nothing, guys. Baltimore ain't exactly a retail bonanza. Little box is for Sylvie. Long one is Sam's.” She took a long draw on her straw and cocked an eyebrow at Alex. “There's something in there for you too, Alex. Manila folder, near the top. But maybe not now. Open it later.”

The kids tore off the wrapping on their presents—a charm bracelet for Sylvie and a silk necktie for Sam. “Pretty!” Sylvie said, motioning with her wrist up like a hand model. “Chic,” Sam said, extending his chin as he double-looped a perfect Windsor knot.

As the kids began parading back and forth with their new accessories, Figgy picked up Alex's phone from the counter. “I need to check the class schedule,” she said.

Alex took a few steps toward the backpack, suddenly overcome with a need to know the contents of the folder. “Can I?” he called over the heads of the kids. Figgy didn't respond. He opened the flap of the backpack and poked inside. Wedged between a pair of
Natashas
scripts was a manila folder with “ALEX” written in Sharpie on the tab. The folder was legal size. He could see documents spilling out from the edges. His heart stuttered.

“You want to do this now?” she asked. She was standing across the kitchen island, eyes cast down, fingers fiddling madly on the screen of his phone. “It's not really a present-present.”

He swallowed hard, the packet trembling in his hands. He looked back up at Figgy, her attention locked on the screen. She
wasn't nosing around his text messages, was she? He'd switched out his SIM card the week before, hadn't he? Or had he forgotten? The last text exchange he'd had with Miranda before the awfulness in her apartment had been a suggestive, not terribly clever riff on a story online about a restaurant in Shanghai that served fox vagina—she wouldn't stumble upon that, would she?

“Go on then,” she said, not looking up. “Ten's a big one. We have to start planning.”

Shit. Shit shit shit. Huck had been right all along. Figgy was no dummy. This was the official notification, just three months shy of the big anniversary. She'd spent her downtime in Baltimore meeting with lawyers, stashing money, and strategizing a clean split. And she was a few swipes away from discovering all the justification she'd ever need. His mouth went dry.

“Go on,” she said.

He did. The type swam around his vision, smaller than it should be, with times and confirmation numbers. It was an itinerary. Five days in Napa Valley. A reservation at the French Laundry. Some kind of class at the Culinary Arts Institute.

“I know it doesn't make up for me being gone,” she said. “But it'll be fun, right? We'll get my mom to stay with the kids? Take an early tenth-anniversary trip?”